_RelleLebby_
In the shadow-soaked kingdom of Haewon, where the Goryeo court moved through incense and whispered treachery, a crown prince woke to find his father dead and his own name painted in accusation. Kim Ji-Dwi did not run from guilt. He ran because survival was the only throne left to claim. His exile carried him past gilded walls into the outer provinces, where merchants spoke in tongues from across the known world, and no man asked another's history.
She had no last name. No allegiance. No mercy in her hands. They called her Nocturne in the trading town of Haedan, a Black woman of impossible beauty and deadlier skill, an assassin whose presence rearranged the air around her. She did not build her life in this foreign land to become anyone's weapon, least of all for a fallen prince who looked at her as if she were both salvation and ruin. He was possessive, unreadable, trained never to show what cost him most. She was deliberate, untouchable, and violently uninterested in being desired.
What ignited between them was not romance. It was war in a different dialect, hatred that masqueraded as hunger, proximity that sharpened into blade-edge tension, secrets that accumulated like bodies in a river. Every glance was a duel. Every silence was a threat. Every touch they did not have became its own kind of violence.
In a realm where betrayal wore the faces of allies, where duels were fought to first blood and sometimes beyond, where jealousy curdled into madness, and revenge demanded its pound of flesh, two people who swore they wanted nothing from each other discovered that wanting nothing was never the same as feeling nothing. The court wanted him dead. His uncle wanted him erased. And Nocturne, Nocturne wanted only what she had always wanted: to survive on terms that belonged to her.
But survival, like love, was a territory that must be defended.